Is charitable resistance just another instance of the Peter Principle at play at your nonprofit arts organization?
It’s election day in the United States. November 5. If you’re not reading this on November 5, then it is not election day in the United States, but it’s likely there is still no real result as yet. Although…who knows? Maybe the country’s citizens either became incredibly smart or incredibly stupid en masse — enough for general agreement from the corporate press folks to call it for one candidate or the other and for both candidates to agree on the results. It could happen. People accept change easily, without complication, right?
Cue the insurrectionists and the rewritten history lovers. They are the leading source of DōnWänüs.
Anyway, while the US’s version of democracy continues to get eaten by demonic capitalism gone bad, let’s talk about the DōnWänüs affecting progress with your local nonprofit arts organizations and their leaders’ unwillingness to face the most important issue that keeps them from succeeding (except in drips and drabs). But first, a short dive into the Peter Principle, as described in the sketch above.
In Dr. Laurence J. Peter’s book, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, Dr. Peter asks the question at hand for nonprofit arts organizations right now: “Why is incompetence so maddeningly rampant and so vexingly triumphant? The Peter Principle, the eponymous law Dr. Laurence J. Peter coined, explains that everyone in a hierarchy — from the office intern to the CEO, from the low-level civil servant to a nation’s president — will inevitably rise to his or her level of incompetence. Dr. Peter explains why incompetence is at the root of everything we endeavor to do — why schools bestow ignorance, why governments condone anarchy, why courts dispense injustice, why prosperity causes unhappiness, and why utopian plans never generate utopias.” (from the Harper Collins description)
As we round the quarter pole of the 21st century, it has become clear that the utopian plans of too many behemoth arts organizations depend on a single artist’s vision. That vision, when it centers on using the power of the charity to express positive, measurable change on a community that is begging for it, can be a catalyzing force, making the charity worthy of support. But when that vision is internal — when it centers around the art but doesn’t answer the community’s needs, just its donors’ wants — the whole industry’s power can get flushed into irrelevant nonexistence.
Perhaps the dinosaurs in charge believed that they were impervious to extraterrestrial rock-throwing because of the majesty of their power.
After 30 years in this business, I know why the Peter Principle occurs so often. In the main, it has to do with justification. If Peter was correct in his determination that “America is a country that doesn’t know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there,” the corollary must be equally true. “The nonprofit arts industry generally knows that where it’s going is a failure spiral, but it’s their failure spiral, so they celebrate it as achievement.”
Simply put, the richest source of DōnWänüs in America courses through nonprofit arts organizations across America. It’s hurting the industry, as shown by the continual bankruptcies, near-bankruptcies, and closings.
Blanket statements, of course, are just that: general. They don’t apply to everyone.
Oh, by now, if you haven’t figured it out, a DōnWänü is a leader entrenched in familiar malfunction scenarios, so entrenched that the idea of change is not merely anathema, but dangerous to the legacy left by that same leader and his/her (but mostly his) mentors. They are the ones who argue that there is a purity to the production of art that exempts the charities from performing the duties it agreed to perform when seeking a nonprofit status. One such DōnWänü wrote recently,
“The majority of community nonprofits are losing money on programs and services each year which is in fact the point of a nonprofit. They are here to serve their communities without the need to make a profit for shareholders, but it doesn’t make fiscal solvency any less crucial to the nonprofit. There are still bills to pay and money does not appear out of thin air. Nonprofits need to be run like a business, but with exceptions knowing that certain programs will lose money but serve the community.”
Pretzel logic, but I know where it comes from. The obsession with money as impact is a board-driven determinant, not a community-based one. In fact, with artistic funding drying up faster than the Dead Sea, it has become clear that funders (foundation, government, individual) want to see results based not on how many people attended, but on why and how their lives were made better.
Many arts leaders are artists that have risen through the ranks. Artists have a different responsibility than arts organizations. So, with little or no knowledge of the nonprofit purpose of their company, their rise to the top reveals a zealous belief that if their predecessor was enabled by a board and other executives to eschew the charity responsibility, then they should be able to as well. Sixth-grade thinking always rises to the top with DōnWänüs.
Some arts nonprofit simply DōnWänü measure their impact; in fact, most who don’t say it’s somehow “impossible” to measure. Other DōnWänüs subscribe to the idea that education without testing is enough, although I’m sure they wouldn’t want their kids to endure that at their elementary school. “To believe that learning doesn’t take place just because you don’t measure it is absurd,” said one reader. She may have missed the point on this: I believe that you simply don’t know if any learning is ever taking place without measuring. That’s what testing is — a widely-practiced form of measurement of efficacy. If you DōnWänü test and collect the right data, as one teacher put it to me, you’re just guessing as to whether what your organization is doing is impactful at all. Or if it’s just child’s play.
Guessing is the safe harbor of the DōnWänüs, I suppose.
We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. There is a big difference between art, artists, and arts organizations. Only art is essential in that it exists (like air). Artists are magical in that they can take disparate ideas and materials and create a new piece of art with its own intrinsic value. Arts organizations are not essential in the purest sense of the word; art and artists existed before them and will exist after they’re all extinct. Nonprofit arts organizations have to prove worth — just like any other business — in order to deserve support. Proving worth is not a product of financial prowess. Neither money nor the subjective idea of “excellence” are the coin of the realm for the nonprofit arts industry; charitable impact is. If they rid themselves of their DōnWänü attitudes toward impact, measurement thereof, and community service requested by their community, they’ve got a shot.
You can do this.
But first, after years of screaming, arguments, paranoia, fear-mongering, xenophobia, talking heads, lies, the promulgation of those lies, insurrections, and other byproducts of a democracy that’s almost gone, it’s Tuesday, November 5. Election day for the leader of the ultimate country of DōnWänüs. It’s not a good democracy, but we had a nice run, didn’t we?
Oh, and if you’re not from America and you’re baffled about how this election thing is supposed to work, don’t worry. It’s not you. It’s US.
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